


O.P. CATALYST

by vanerz



Category: Inazuma Eleven, Inazuma Eleven: Ares no Tenbin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Kidou and Haizaki are side characters, M/M, Nonlinear Narrative, Speculation, inspired by Outer Code 3 and the 2017 Inazuma Eleven Ares trailer, mentions of Nosaka only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 06:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12743157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanerz/pseuds/vanerz
Summary: Despite their best efforts, the world has ended. But Fudou is given a second chance. Interpreting Outer Code Episode 3 through an alternative viewpoint.





	O.P. CATALYST

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart. - Haruki Murakami  
> 

The attacks of before had been child’s play, mere skirmishes compared to this one, which could only be termed a full-scale invasion. The outer walls had fallen like paper; the inner walls weren’t going to last much longer. Hand in hand, leaping over fallen people and sliding under fallen debris, Fudou and Sakuma ran, past a bleeding Kidou and a tottering, swaying Haizaki, into the innermost corridors of the HQ.

They reached the end and Fudou slammed one hand on the button that opened the lab doors. He thought he heard an echoing slump from Haizaki’s direction, but there was no time to make sure, and it was so loud, surely it was anything else?

There was no time to waste. All thoughts of Kidou and Haizaki left his mind as the doors finally widened enough for him and Sakuma to slip through, and they were running again, racing down the familiar route to what had practically been their second home these past few sleepless months.

The moment they entered the lab room, Fudou wrenched the satchel with the mission supplies they had prepared just two days prior from the wall. Sakuma tore open the control panel and typed in the initiation commands with shaking hands, and Fudou flung open the door to the pod. No time for subtlety. It was the day they had always known would come.

He cast a furtive glance at Sakuma, whose hands were still running along the keyboard like a river gushing on rock. Then he looked back at the pod.

This would work. He’d make it work.

“Sakuma,” Fudou called, then yelled again, realising his voice had become hoarse sometime during the carnage. “Get in!”

Sakuma turned, expression frantic but focused, mouth opening as if about to reply _._

 _Come on, move, I can do all the adjustments from inside!_  Fudou’s brain screamed, but before the words could reach his mouth, the laboratory doors opened to reveal rows and rows of Ares children and their golden glowing eyes.

Sakuma’s eyes cooled. His gaze sharpened. Fudou’s heart sunk.

“IN!” Sakuma yelled. In one controlled, explosive motion, he swept one arm out towards the pod and swung his other arm and clenched fist behind him, towards the key that would initiate the string of commands he had just typed. Fudou’s feet moved to obey even before his brain finished processing the words. The doors to the pod started to slide shut, and just before they closed the very last thing Fudou saw before he was wrenched across time was bright, bright light –

* * *

If you’d told Fudou six years ago that the world would turn into this, he’d have laughed. At you.

Up until high school, he had led an unremarkable, if tough life in Ehime Prefecture, a life of cutting coupons out of magazines from the trash and trying to make every pair of socks and shoes last, even if they got a little tight or frayed, because every yen counted. Then a scout had approached him and asked if he would be interested in a football scholarship at a Tokyo high school. It had been a no-brainer, of course. An all-expenses-paid ride out of his shitty provincial town? Two birds with one stone. Fudou wouldn’t have said no to any school, much less  _the_  Teikoku Academy.

Scratch that. If you’d told Fudou just a year ago that the world would turn into this, he’d have – well, by then he’d grown beyond laughing directly in people’s faces. It was a natural consequence of dating Sakuma Jirou in high school (the highlight of an otherwise mediocre experience) and then following him to university. As Fudou learned well, Sakuma was prickly by nature, and any direct ridicule, even in the form of affectionate banter, was liable to get you the cold shoulder for days. But he had a lovely side that Fudou adored from the bottom of his heart and had even thought he’d grow old (and rich) with.

Fudou still remembered that one summer during their first year of university when Sakuma had come to visit Ehime. They’d gone to Iyo, a neighbouring city famous for its castle. Fudou would never forget the wide-eyed wonder with which Sakuma had traversed the castle grounds, from its elegant courtyards to the top of its fortified turrets. He had something to say about every artefact on display and had ended up giving Fudou, the actual Ehime local, a comprehensive history lesson. What a damn nerd. Fudou had laughed then, loud and hearty, and Sakuma’s only retaliation had been a warm smile.

Then during the train ride home, Nosaka Yuuma, the inhumanly skilled football star Fudou only vaguely remembered playing against in high school, lost his equilibrium and entered homeostatic breakdown. He was a Vissel Kobe player now, based in Kobe, but they felt the shockwave even in Ehime. Their train derailed. Some people flew out the windows. Others lay unmoving on the floor, or draped along the train seats. There was some blood.

Miraculously, Fudou and Sakuma only had the wind knocked out of them. The first thing they thought to do was get out of the train and call for help. But neither of them, nor any of the other survivors, could get any cell reception. As they waited for help in the Ehime countryside, distant screeches like missile fire cut through the otherwise quiet day, and the sky was periodically bathed in a golden glow, each instance coming from a different direction. When night fell, still with no rescuer in sight, Fudou wasn’t laughing anymore.

* * *

Even when his surroundings settled and everything felt like it had stopped moving, it was all Fudou could do to open his eyes. The room was only faintly lit, which helped the pain in his head somewhat. He felt like he had been sucker punched in the gut with nausea.

If everything had gone according to plan, he was in one of the basement rooms of the Kidou Corporation HQ. According to Kidou six years later, it had once been one of Kidou Corp’s unused safe rooms, except it clearly wasn’t. Around him, rows of cabinets stretched almost to the ceiling and probably covered the entire room. Back when they were building the time machine, Fudou and the others had racked their brains to think of somewhere that had been continuously empty over the entire period they were planning to travel through. They’d thought it was a condition required to successfully time travel, and Kidou had confirmed a hundred times that this particular safe room qualified. So much for that! Fudou had only just got here, and already he had made a lucky escape.

A spasm racked through his body. Fudou retched, though it was dry, and fought to stop his body from heaving. It was more difficult than normal. His frame felt too small, too light. He raked a hand through his hair, and the bushy mohawk confirmed his suspicions: he was back to his fourteen-year-old body.

Okay. Sure. There was no point in asking why, as long as he knew what  _was_. And really, didn’t this just make his mission easier?

Finally, Fudou had the presence of mind to take cover near the cabinets closest to him. This room was clearly in use and Kidou Corp security could enter at any moment. And while Fudou was intimately familiar with everything about this HQ five years later, this HQ  _now_  felt like somewhere he had never been before. No one here was farming, fighting the Ares soldiers, maintaining the barricades, or madly researching how to alter history and fix things before it became too late. (Wow, when you laid out the ATHENA base this way, it really was a wonder that Kidou had let him and Sakuma do what they wanted all this time.) Right now, everyone in the building was a paper-pusher, a salaryman (or woman) working to fuel their lifestyle or feed their family. The sounds most people would associate with this building were grids of employees typing away at their computers, or polite discussion during meetings, or the network servers humming away. Not distant, but constant bursts of gunfire, booming explosions, and the intermittent eerie rings in the distance that signalled the end of yet another Ares child. Was this really what it had been like during Homeostasis? So much had changed that Fudou could barely reconcile the Kidou Corp HQ of now and the future. And yet, why did it feel like the biggest change had been in himself?

He was at April 11 of his fifteenth year of life. Fudou knew this like he knew that the Earth was round. Sakuma had calculated and cross-checked the dates and geographical coordinates time and time again, and Fudou had no doubt that he had sent him successfully to his destination. He trusted Sakuma with his life. Kidou’s uncertain recollections of his office layout… not so much.

A creak from the far end of the room caught his attention, and he ducked and pressed his body against the cabinet. Slowly, the door swung open and light bloomed in.

“Who’s there?”

A more focused beam that was probably a torchlight slid along the walls. Fudou figured he was probably in its blind spot, and he wasn’t about to risk leaving it to check. He tried to stay as motionless as possible despite the cramp building up in his thighs. As long as the guard didn’t get near his side of the room, he wouldn’t even know Fudou was here, though that knowledge didn’t ease the pounding of his heart. So much for always empty. This was the last time he was trusting a CEO to know the minute details of his own company!

But at least he knew where the exit was now.

When Fudou was sure the guard had gone, he slipped out of the door and exited the HQ as quickly as he could. No doubt he’d be picked up by the security cameras, but who was going to recognise a scruffy mohawked boy from the other side of Japan?

Once he reached street level, it was relatively easy to orient himself in this new, but familiar world. Staking out Teikoku was easy enough, and with the money in his satchel he managed to rent a room that was in the area for the next few days.

And after that, as the diverge point hurtled closer towards him in time, all Fudou could do was wait.

* * *

They had combed their collective memories obsessively for the diverge point. It wasn’t just Kidou, Sakuma, and Fudou who had been filled with demons and regrets in the months following homeostatic breakdown – Haizaki had too, perhaps the most out of all of them. He had been the one pitted against the Ares program, even if he hadn’t known it at the time. The main component of the program had been named the Balance of Ares after its creator’s dream to even the scales between pure talent and hard work. It had served its purpose too well.

The first Ares subject had been an unremarkable middle school boy with only a love for football. No one had thought much of it at the time, but when Nosaka Yuuma displayed the speed and analytical precision of a machine to rout Haizaki Ryouhei, the ultimate bastion of middle school talent, Japan and the rest of the world started to pay attention. Nosaka had been the catalyst that powered the Ares program to success, and governments and private corporations invested in (or stole) the technology to create soldiers of their own. The Balance of Ares was championed worldwide and heralded as the path to true equality.

A mere five years later, Nosaka Yuuma imploded, generating a three-hundred-kilometre shockwave that decimated everything in its epicentre. Governments and corporations realised that what they had were not soldiers but ticking time bombs. Like dominoes falling all over themselves, they dug out adverse event protocols from deep inside their vaults and executed their risk management procedures against their Ares charges. And like a chain reaction, the Ares children banded together to defend themselves against the world that now wanted them gone. You were either with them or against them. Within a few days it was war.

It was a month after the train accident when Fudou and Sakuma finally straggled up to the gates of Kidou Corp HQ, one of the last remaining ATHENA strongholds in Japan. Haizaki had tried to kill them on sight; they’d been lucky that Kidou had been nearby. But when the Ares children attacked the next day, it was also Haizaki who fought tirelessly and fired the final shot that scared them away. It was guilt, Kidou explained to them well out of his earshot. Haizaki was convinced that this could all never have happened if only, in middle school, he had taken Nosaka Yuuma more seriously.

So that was the most obvious place to start when looking for the diverge point. After all, Haizaki had been the one who’d had the most contact with Nosaka before homeostatic breakdown. Whatever he thought was the problem was probably as good as they were going to get.

But Haizaki wasn’t the one time travelling. What was their own diverge point?

“You know,” Sakuma said to Fudou one day during lunch (entirely hydroponically grown salad and grains, which was, of course, disgusting), “did I ever tell you that Haizaki thrashed us our last year of middle school?”

“As a first-year?” Fudou replied, sceptical. “You were that bad?”

“It was me. Middle school me was a brat. You know how in high school I was still hung up over Kidou transferring out in middle school? It was worse the very first year after he left. I just couldn’t get over him. I think I needed someone to call me out and tell me to stop being so stupid,” Sakuma said bluntly. “And we had problems with our coach, too. They were justified. We’d sacked him the year before for being evil. Long story. But…” His lips tightened and his brows furrowed. “If we’d listened to him, I wonder if we could have defeated Haizaki and showed him that he wasn’t unstoppable.”

Fudou squinted at Sakuma. His bangs hung over his one visible eye, making him look almost defeated. It wasn’t a look that suited the man he had once seen take out an entire squad of enemies with just a well-timed hand grenade and a pistol.

“So is that our diverge point, then?” he asked. “Make sure the team listens to your evil coach and beats the crap out of Haizaki?”

One side of Sakuma’s lips drew down in a grimace. But he nodded.

* * *

The days passed quicker than expected, though what was fast to someone who had gone back years in the space of a few moments?

Fudou had spent some of his newfound time reliving his old pleasures, like going to the arcade. He’d spent some funds on new pleasures too, like all-you-can-eat sushi. But most of his time was spent lurking near Teikoku, watching the members of the football team and getting an idea of what he would have to work with.

On the day of the diverge point, Fudou arrived at the auditorium early and made himself comfortable in one of the plush seats in the front row. He turned his head back when the members of the Teikoku football team started to file in, but surprisingly, Sakuma wasn’t among them. Fudou regarded them, recognising some of them from high school, and the team stared back curiously, though none of them did a thing. A haughty, confident nod was all Fudou gave them before he turned back to the front and closed his eyes.

It was fifteen minutes later when the door opened again. Fudou turned, more discreetly this time, to see two more Teikoku players descend the stairs to the front, fielding high-fives and greetings along the way.

It was Sakuma and Genda, of course, though younger than he had ever seen them. Something twinged faintly in Fudou’s heart when he took in Genda’s lion’s mane and his tall, solid frame, faithfully in step behind Sakuma. Genda had been one of his closest friends in high school, and yet Fudou had never learned whether he had survived the homeostatic breakdown.

But if he accomplished what he had come here to do, he never would have to.

Fudou snapped out of his reverie and caught the tail end of Teikoku finally demanding to know just who he was. He barely had enough time to close his eyes and compose himself before Sakuma and Genda stepped down in front of him.

“Who are you?” fourteen-year-old Sakuma asked, and his voice was so measured, so detached, and above all so young that he might as well have been a totally different person.

“Who knows?” Fudou replied. And who really did, anymore?

“Hey,” one of the team members interjected, “don’t be rude to our captain!”

That was right. Sakuma, for all the criticisms future him would spout about his middle school self, had been captain.

“Captain?” Fudou repeated, finally opening his eyes to look at his fourteen-year-old, not-yet best friends. Genda looked pretty much as expected: tall, feet and shoulders squared up towards him, expression uncompromising and stern. The face paint he liked to wear made him look like a young warrior.

But Sakuma was different. Though Fudou could see the impression of the man he had grown to love, fourteen-year-old Sakuma… was just a _child_. Irritation was visibly forming on his face and his fists were tightly clenched. Fudou looked at him,  _really_  looked at him, his gaze moving up and down, and Sakuma’s shoulders drew back in uncertainty. The Sakuma in front of him was a meek little lamb. He did not resemble the fierce, confident fighter Fudou knew and loved at all.

For a moment, Fudou couldn’t speak. But he recovered quickly, the gears in his brain spinning on autopilot, powered by wistful memories. Sakuma had once said that middle school him had needed a good talking to, to shock his system and help him past his mental block. It was the first and only time he had given Fudou approval to yell at him, and Fudou would be more than happy to oblige.

Because this world was soft and unprepared. The populace was dormant, going about their daily lives with such routine that they might as well be ants. They had no idea what was coming to destroy them.

Not that he could talk. They had failed, and his world was gone. His heart twinged at that. Everyone he knew – and the light twinge grew now into a sharp pang, and for a moment, all he could see was that bright, warm smile at Iyo castle – was probably dead.

But he wasn’t the only relic left from the future they had all ruined together. There was one more thing, though it was no longer perfectly laid out on paper. Just bits of it in his head. But it would have to do.

They had never formally named it, but Fudou had always called it O.P. CATALYST.

Operation: Poison Catalyst.

Nosaka Yuuma had been the catalyst for the homeostatic breakdown.

And Fudou was going to deactivate him.

* * *

Fudou slung the satchel newly filled with mission supplies over his shoulder and swiped into the time travel lab. Sakuma was there, as expected, and so were the other scientists, but there were two unexpected faces: Kidou, and his guardian lapdog Haizaki. All of them had frowny faces and turned towards him as he walked in. Fudou was used to attracting attention at the worst of times, but the combined silence and intensity of their expressions unnerved even him.

“What?” he said. “Before you get any ideas, the money in this bag’s all useless. You think anyone takes yen nowadays?”

Nobody acknowledged his quip. “Fudou,” Sakuma said instead, tone thoughtful, “where were you in middle school?”

“Ehime,” Fudou said, “rotting away. As you know. Why?”

“Ehime,” Kidou said, as if it were the name of an exotic fruit and not the boring shithole Fudou had only been too glad to leave. “And you said you’d never been to Tokyo before that?”

“You know my history, Kidou-kun,” Fudou drawled. “Never left my prefecture before I moved to Tokyo for high school.”

“Well, none of  _us_  can go back,” Sakuma said with a frown. In this lab, next to this machine, there was only one place he could have meant. “We’d crash into each other. Our past selves. It’d ruin everything.”

“What are you saying?” Fudou said, but it was just a jerk move to make Kidou have to be the one to explain it. And actually, now was not the time. “You bastards. You’re not seriously putting the fate of the world on my shoulders? You do know who you’re standing in front of, don’t you?”

Kidou inclined his head, a typically uber-serious, apologetic expression already on his face. Trust him to feel intense personal responsibility for everything, even in the apocalypse. “I wouldn’t have wanted to put all the pressure on you,” he said, his tone heavy. “If there was a different way, believe me…”

But Fudou had already stopped listening. Instead, he looked at all the other people in the room, at their alternating expressions of resignation and hope and everything in between.

In reality, he had read about self-collision and spatial collision just the day before and had independently come to the same conclusion. After all, out of all of them, he  _was_  the only one who hadn’t been anywhere near the designated spatial location (Greater Tokyo) during the diverge period.

He hadn’t wanted to say it.

But he had already known that he would have to go alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Tenses in time travel fiction is hard. Also, I want to thank my three beta readers Clem, Noon, and Victor, very, very much. And also the guy who made the [Eminem/Eurythmics Sweet Dreams Without Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nMjrn_ftE4) mashup. (Incidentally, while the mashup is the mood music to the showdown parts of this fic, ["Parallel and Repeat" by Seavera](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99zXPngvVsM) very much inspired the more melancholy bits, especially the bittersweet FuSaku. Thanks Seavera!) Finally, thank you for reading.


End file.
